150 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [April 



The annual sickness, imported with the mail from 

 the south every spring, was now prevalent; nearly all 

 the Eskimos were vomiting and many had diarrhea — 

 the heavy tax imposed upon the germ-free native in 

 return for the comforts and luxuries of his white brother 

 in the South. 



'Every morning these hardy hunters hitched their 

 dogs to their sledges and headed out over an apparently 

 interminable field of ice toward the open sea below the 

 distant horizon. Eagerly the wives and children watched 

 the whiteness for a returning black dot, which, as it 

 approached, often developed into tired dogs and an 

 empty-handed, frost-bitten driver, driven homeward by 

 the bitter winds sweeping from the Greenland glaciers 

 off toward the south. Or on a luckier day, the heavy 

 load of frozen red meat would be met and escorted 

 triumphantly into the snow settlement by a troop of 

 stray dogs and expectant little ones. 



These men were struggling for existence under condi- 

 tions which daily resulted in ice-stiffened traces, frozen 

 boots, frozen mittens, scarred faces, and black hair 

 turned snow-white with frost! I determined to go and 

 see for myself how the struggle was carried on. On 

 April 10th, Tung -we, Teddy - ling - wa, Mene, and I 

 sledged to the edge of open water far to the south. 

 And now not a track or crack or smallest hole escaped 

 these ever- watchful, sharp eyes. The native finds meat 

 and lives where you and I would see nothing and die. 

 Tung- we, apparently as unobservant as myself, grabbed 

 his sealing -iron and coil of rawhide, sprang from his 

 moving sledge, ran ten yards to the right, and half 

 inclined his body over a two-inch hole in the surface 

 of the ice. We held our course steadily in order to re- 



